Website usage via browsers is regularly tracked and analyzed by commercially available web analytics services, which gather detailed data about web page usage, and to some extent about particular website users. Entities which provide other entities with web analytics services are referred to as “analytics providers”. One leading web analytics provider is Omniture, Inc., of Orem, Utah, the owner of the present invention. Omniture provides web analytics technology under its well-known mark SiteCatalyst™. All other marks used herein are property of their respective owners.
Web analytics data can be collected from many sources, such as by reading server logs or by using web-beacons. Web-beacons are small image requests placed in a web page to cause communication between the user's device and a server. The server may be controlled by the analytics provider, by the vendor whose website contains the web-beacons, or by another party. Web-beacons are also known as clear GIFs, web bugs, image requests, or pixel tags. Web-beacons can be used for advertising, behavioral targeting, and other processes, to gather information a visits to websites. Web-beacons are commonly used by analytics providers to gather analytics data.
In particular, in some known web-beacon-based analytics systems, a web-beacon is pasted into website pages to cause communication with a core JavaScript file on the customer server; web-beacons may also be hosted on other servers, such as analytics provider (Omniture) servers. The pasted web-beacon code is served on each HTML page the customer wishes to track. The core JavaScript file is effectively included via the pasted code.
Some cell phones and other wireless devices can be configured with a web browser, RSS feed aggregator, and/or other tools for accessing web and/or other internet content without requiring the use of a browser running on an end-user's personal computer. Examples include cell phones, other mobile phones, wireless devices such as those sold under the Blackberry mark, personal digital assistants such as those sold under the Palm mark, and/or other devices, including handheld devices and others. Such wireless web devices communicate with a wireless gateway using one or more wireless communication protocols such as WAP, J2ME, I-mode, LEAP, EZWeb, and J-SkyWeb. The wireless gateway communicates in turn with the web using one or more internet protocols such as HTTP, HTTPS, XML, and RSS, among others. Browser examples may also be found on phones, running under the phone's operating system; the term “browser” is not limited to programs running on a desktop computer.
Some typical web-beacon-based web analytics products can track visitor information about a served web page by executing JavaScript code on that page that constructs a web-beacon request (usually a transparent 1x1 GIF with name-value pairs) which is sent to the designated web analytics servers. The analytics servers then collect the information from the web-beacon request, serve the GIF to the browser client and process that data for consumption by the analytics provider's customer.
As compared with browser clients on PCs, browser clients on wireless devices often involve additional steps in the process. In one scenario, for instance, a wireless device sends a WAP request to a WAP gateway/proxy, which sends an HTTP request to an origin server. The origin server sends an HTTP response to the WAP gateway/proxy, which then sends a WAP response to the wireless device.
Other concepts related to the present invention may be known, or become apparent through sources other than this background, including without limitation the references being made of record in connection with the present patent application. This background was written in hindsight, with the present invention already in mind.